THE MYTH OF THE IRISH WRITER

Rill Phillips

Within seconds of stepping off the feny the visitor to the Emerald Isle is introduced to a strange native species known as the Irish Writer. These creatures are depicted on posters, tea towels, calendars, mugs, maps and other tourist mementoes and are to be found in every village store, tourist office, newsagent's, bus station and feny port throughout the island. Some of thenames will be familiar to the tourist, though most of the grey, blotchily reproduced faces will not be: they sell, which is what matters. This promotion of the Irish Writer has succeeded in giving the impression that there are a disproportionatenumbcr of them in the literary world; there may be German writers, Italian writers, American writers and English writers as well as innumerable others, but the nation with that extra special propensity for hepen is the Irish. But what is an Irish writer? It is quite easy to define a French writer: he or she will probably be French, may well, though not necessarily, write about France or the French people and will probably have spent most of his or her life in France.Furthermore,theFrench writer, by definition, writes in French and within a recognisably French literary tradition. The Irish Writercannot be defined so easily. Until thecreation of the Irish Free State in 1921 Ireland was part of the British Empire. Millions of Irish men and women have migrated back and forth across the Irish Sea for centuries and still do. English, Welsh and Scots men and womcn have done the same. The majority of Irish migrants sought work and a higher standard of living in Bntain, while the English in Ireland, often referred to as the Anglo-Irish, moved into the country as a form of ruling class, as landowners, merchants or governmcnt offícials. W.B. Yeats, for example, was Anglo-Irish on his father's sidethrough thc Yeats and Butlerfamilies,and aisoon his mother's side through the Pollexfens who wereoriginaily from Comwall. The populations of both Britain and Ireland are a mixture of many peoples and it is thankfully absurd to boast of having pure Irish, pure Celtic or pure English blood; they are concepts that do not exist except in the ravings of racial supremacists. It has been suggested that Celtic cultures are naturally gifted with language and are therefore able to produce great literature, this despite the fact that Gaelic has sadly been repressed by the English for centuria, while the most literate people, the writers, are precisely the ones most alienated from their Celtic roots by their English educations. The main critenon for being considered an Irish Writer is accident of birth, but this seems to bc rathcr an inadequale reason for distinguishing one writcr from another. Arthur Conan Doyle was bom in Edinburgh (of Irish parents) but he is not especially defined as a Scottish Writer, George Orwell was born in Burma but is not defined as a Burmese Writer and Rudyard Kipling was bom in Bombay and he is certainly not remernbcred as an Indian Writer. Ncverthcless George Bemard Shaw, whose family lived in Dublin for rnuch thc same imperialist reasons that Orwell's lived in Burma, is an Irish Writer. Shaw himself would be the frst to laugh at his depiction on tea towels of pure Irish linen: "1 am" he said, "a typical Irishrnan; my family camc frorn Yorkshire". Many Irish Writers, such as George Bemard Shaw and Samuel Beckett were brought up,educated, scrvcd their writing apprenticeships, becarnesuccessful, livedand died outside of Ireland. Often England, and specifically London, was the place they came to. Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsrnith made their names in London and were infinitely happier there than in their native land. They became rnembers of the English literary scene, and it was in London that they enjoyed success and popularity, and from which they had to flee when Fortune turned against thern. The subject of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" rnay be traced back to his native village in Ircland, but it could equally be an English villagc and as literature it is in the same tradition of English rural poetry that William Cowper, Georgc Crabbeand John Clare were also to write. Another Irish Writer who specialiscd in a traditional English literary form was Oscar Wilde, who successfully revived the Comedy of Manners at theend of the ninetecnth century. Since England kept Ireland in a state of nurnbing povcrty and provincialism for centuries it is inevitable that education, ideas and culture had to be sought elsewhere. It is not until the twentieth century that Ireland itself becornes the inspiration for Irish Writers. James Joyce could not bear to rernain in Dublin, loathed the instiiutions of his native land and ndiculed attempts to revive the Irish language. And so, although Dublin becomes the protagonist of Ulysses, and Joyce's upbringing the subject of A Portraitof [heArtistma Young Man, helived, wroteand waspublishedon thecontinent. W.B. Yeats spent rnuch of his childhood in England and began his literary career there. It was in London that he learned of the French syrnbolist poets whose influence was to affecthis own worksoslrongly. Butof writcrs suchas W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Seamus Heaney and perhaps James Joyce it is at least reasonable to say of them that they arelrish Writers if only because it is Ireland, its history, its people and its future, that concerns them. Even those Irish Writers who are primarily concemed with Ireland itself (and they are a minority among those generally classified as Irish Writers) not only write within an English literary tradition, but more irnportantly, actually write in the English language. The reason for this is the same reason that so many Irish Writers are of English Protestant families: English irnperialism. There can be no doubt that the loss of the Irish language and the hundreds of years of repression that the Irish have suffered since the Norman invasion have their ongin on the eastern side of the Irish Sea. Unforgiveable though the actions of the English may be, it is absurd to pretend for reasons of guilt or sentirnentaliiy that the Irish, or the Celts, have a special propensity for producing literature superior to that of other nations. Thcre are more similarities than there are differences between writers who are Irish and British writers. Oliver Goldsmith has far more in cornrnon with George Crabbe than either of them have with William Blake; W.B. Yeats shares more with T.S. Eliot than he does with Wilfred Owen; Irishness is useless as a rneans of literary definition. Since ties with Britain have been so close and entangled throughout history this is inevitable and it is only whcn Ireland itself becornes the writers' major preoccupation ihat the Irish Writer can tmly be discemed. Since it is only really in this century that a few Irish Writers have concemed thernselves with their own country (Swift may have satirically suggested that Irish rnothers se11 their babies as food, but the subject was hardly his principal preoccupation), there are really only a handful ofpeople for whom the titlelrish Writerhasany significance,andthatsignifícance is surely political rather than literary. Dclightful though it may be for English Literature academics to fragment thcir discipline into dozens of neat and profitablecompartments, within the British Isles there is really only one tradition, and that is English. But don't te11 the tourists.